Industry Report

"User experience (UX)," the emotions, attitudes and actions that a product or service elicits from consumers, is becoming more multi-dimensional. The key to delivering solid UX is understanding the value of a product from the user's perspective. This has become a key pursuit of leading global companies as they try to offer differentiated UX such as pleasure, convenience, familiarity and uniqueness to their customers. Even Intel now touches more things in people's lives than just the PC as it strives to "develop technologies that people want."

The term "user experience" was not added to the lexicon of the 1990s information technology (IT) boom until Donald Norman at Apple Computer coined the term "UX Architect" in 1993. However, various industries already were applying its core elements -- convenient use, good design and naturalness.

Later, the advent of digital technologies enabled IT products and services to widen UX and that was followed by universal use of the Internet, which led to online UX. The increasing convergence of information and communication technology (e.g., development of smart grid and telematics, etc.) is spawning new UX values. Offering differentiated UX is now a task for all industries.

Even if a company's product and service has outstanding technology and function, it can fail if UX is insufficient. Outstanding UX raises customer loyalty and contributes to corporate image building. This paper examines how UX is evolving and presents actions plans for Korean companies to strengthen UX capability.